The car engines, cans, utensils, airplanes, and foil are just a few of the many basic things used in daily life made possible by aluminum. Aluminum has proved incredibly useful due to its low density, resistance to corrosion, lightweight, and it’s ability to make up strong alloys. This useful metal is not naturally found in the environment; it is derived from ores found in the earths crust. Aluminum the most abundant metal on earth, but despite this, it remains expensive because of the large amount of power used in its production (2). Aluminum has been valued since its discovery for its practical uses, and remained rare for many years due to the difficulty of extracting it in its pure form. There are two processes which contribute to the economic mass production of aluminum. The first was discovered in 1886 by two scientists working separately and is known as the Hall-Heroult process, named after its two inventors. The other was discovered two years later and significantly contributed to refining aluminum at an economically reasonable cost. This process is known as the Bayer process. Together, these two processes compose the procedures which are taken to produce aluminum today (3). The first phase of purification is the Bayer process, which produces alumin through the refinement of bauxite, a rock extracted from the earth containing

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